While the Torah contains a commandment to “love your neighbor,” it has no equivalent of Jesus’ call to “love your enemies.” This difference, writes Ari Lamm, creates a very different Jewish answer to the question of whether it is moral to celebrate the recent demise of the head of Islamic State. Citing a sermon given by his grandfather, Rabbi Norman Lamm, in 1973, he clarifies Jewish position:

First, there are some ideas, movements, or even people who are so profoundly, unusually evil that hatred is not only justified but required. All decent people should feel hatred for a Haman, or a Hitler, and no contextualizing or relativizing will exempt us from this basic requirement. There is nothing that we can learn about Stalin’s background, or Pol Pot’s childhood, that can earn them our love and forgiveness.

By the same token, Jewish tradition has also understood hatred’s wildly destructive potential. It has thus sought deliberately to circumscribe it as much as possible, reserving it only for those singularly evil individuals who unquestionably deserve it. As [the elder] Lamm concluded, “We must live our lives so that the commandment of hatred becomes the most difficult of all to observe. And by restricting our hatred to evil and those who personify it . . . we shall learn to act lovingly to all God’s creatures.”

So, may we hate Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? . . . [N]ot only may we; we must. In [Lamm’s] words, “monsters who seek sadistically to wipe out whole populations—such people remain deserving, on purely moral grounds, of actual contempt and hatred.”

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.